Even by the low standards of recent times, both candidates have run negative, small-minded campaigns. Mr Obama’s descent into the gutter has been especially tawdry. Rather than defend his own record or lay out what he wants to do about the deficit, the erstwhile candidate of hope has set his attack dogs on such weighty issues as how much tax Mr Romney paid or how many jobs were lost at Bain Capital, a company that Mr Romney for the most part ran rather well. The best Democratic speech of the season was actually made by Bill Clinton. Those failures caught up with Mr Obama in Denver this week. He can do a lot better than that.

Mr Romney’s small-mindedness is of two sorts. First, he has absurdly tried to blame Mr Obama for the full horrors of a recession the president inherited from Mr Bush and which economists give him credit for coping with (see our poll in this article). Second, Mr Romney has repeatedly run away from saying in detail what he would do. That may be because he wants to avoid restating the impractical and extreme positions he embraced to win his party’s nomination (everything from banning civil unions to refusing to raise any new taxes to deal with the deficit). But Mr Romney’s case for election, given his long record as a flipflopper, is hard to pin down.

Whatever happens on November 6th, America will emerge from this election an extremely divided country. At present nearly two in three whites will vote for Mr Romney: and four out of five non-whites will vote for Mr Obama. The ideological divide is wider than in any recent election. Mr Obama is still moaning that the rich should pay more taxes. Mr Romney still tends to blame big government for everything. A Romney victory would see a very sharp change of direction, with deep cuts in both taxes and spending and the repeal of Mr Obama’s cumbersome health-care and financial-services reforms. However, given that neither man is being very precise, whichever side loses will be able to claim in January that the new president has no real mandate for the changes he seeks.